r729 - trunk

[DONOTREPLY at icculus.org]

Author: thilo
Date: 2006-04-27 11:49:17 -0400 (Thu, 27 Apr 2006)
New Revision: 729

Added:
   trunk/md4-readme.txt
Log:
Added readme detailing about the MD4/MDR format ioquake3 supports.


Added: trunk/md4-readme.txt
===================================================================
--- trunk/md4-readme.txt	2006-04-27 14:48:35 UTC (rev 728)
+++ trunk/md4-readme.txt	2006-04-27 15:49:17 UTC (rev 729)
@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@
+##########################################################
+# Info about the MD4 format supported by the ioQ3 engine #
+##########################################################
+
+All models included with the original version of Quake3 from id soft are in
+the MD3 format. Animations in this format are realized by saving the position
+of every vertex in each frame which can make these files pretty large.
+
+ID started work on a newer format, the MD4 format which they never finished.
+This format uses a skeleton with all vertices "attached" to their bones.
+Because only the position of the bones must be stored for each frame and the
+number of bones is not very high this format is more efficient when
+doing animations.
+
+Raven software "finished" this format originally started by ID and included
+it in their game EliteForce. They called their model format "MDR" which is
+the name I have used throughout the sourcecode and I will continue using in
+this readme. Since the code on how to handle those MDR files was released
+under a GPL licence a long time ago, I was able to implement this format for
+Quake3 and do some efficiency improvements.
+To enable the support for this model format, go to qcommon/qfiles.h,
+remove the comment slashes for #define RAVENMDR and then compile the engine.
+
+Including finished MDR models in your projects is easy: just load the model
+files in your cgame code as you would normally load an MD3 model. The engine
+will expect the models to have a ".mdr" suffix.
+The rest is pretty much the same: Selecting the current animation frame,
+adding a skin to the model, etc..
+You can check out the original eliteforce game sourcecode if you want to
+have examples on using the md4s. The source can be got at:
+http://eliteforce2.filefront.com/
+You can also get reference MDR files there, just go to the model/skin
+section there and pick something to download.
+
+Now here comes the tricky part:
+Creating files with this format. There are tools to create these kinds of
+MDR files, like a plugin for Milkshape.
+
+A pretty good overview about MDR file creation is available at
+http://synapse.vgfort.com/
+You can find some tools for creating MDR files there.
+
+On a sidenote:
+There is an independent implementation of the MD4 file format available
+here:
+http://gongo.quakedev.com/
+At this time, ioquake3 has no support for these models though that may
+change in the future. Nevertheless, he has got a tool for skeletal
+animations that can possibly be hooked into the MDR format with some
+modifications.
+
+
+Good luck!
+ - Thilo Schulz